Xeno-canto
In 2024, XC won the Dutch Data Prize in the category Life Science and Health. This prize is an initiative of 4TU.ResearchData, DANS, Health-RI and SURF for FAIRly shared research data.
Together with Willem-Pier Vellinga and Sander Pieterse, I run xeno-canto.org, the world's largest community database of wildelife sound recording.
It currently features about 900,000 recordings of more than 12,000 species of birds, grasshoppers, bats and frogs, shared by more than 10,000 recordists from around the globe.
It is probably the collection with the greatest number of bird species on record on the planet.
It is generously supported financially by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center.
Recordings have been used in more than 4000 publications (Google Scholar count, Jan 2023).
Recordings are used for surveys, taxonomic descriptions, conservation work, behavioural and evolutionary analyses, and forms the basic training set for many machine learning algorithms such as BirdNET, Merlin, AvesAcheo and Perch.
In fact, since 2014, Xeno-canto has also been participating in the yearly BirdCLEF challenge, in which computer science groups from around the world compete to identify bird species using machine learning.
If you have made any recordings of birds, consider sharing these on xeno-canto. Registration is free!
